When the Life360 application pinged with “Stephen arrived home” followed by “Stephen left home,” I was driving past our house aboard a 60-seater coach with a tour group of 130 Brazilians.
They were the tourists; I was the photographer capturing their incentive trip to Cape Town.
Whenever I shoot these incentive travel assignments overseas — something I’ve done for the last 14 years — I’m typically like a deer in headlights.
Me, a tourist with wide eyes, taking in everything, marvelling at every detail, wondering what the different signs mean and where little alleyways lead.
I look at the world through the eyes of intrigue.
But this time, as we wound our way through my hometown, I found myself wondering what these Brazilian visitors were thinking.
As we passed over Chapman’s Peak, looking down on the white expanses of Noordhoek Beach, were there surfers among them thinking, “That looks like a good wave, a good beach to surf”?
Driving through Kalk Bay, my age-old stomping ground, I wondered if they noticed all the things I know intimately—the surf break, the tidal pools, the thatch-roofed church, the little fisherman’s flats on the hillside.
Did they feel the same type of intrigue about places so familiar to me?
I wanted to stand up and grab the microphone to tell them all about my life story, about where I went to primary school as we drove past.
I knew though, that’s not what they were there for. They weren’t interested in my particular ways of the world—they were tourists absorbing the sights and sounds of Cape Town.
There’s something wonderful about being this type of tourist in your hometown. Being in a coach (or “bus” as we call it), you have that elevated perspective, looking down without the responsibility of driving, able to see things differently.
It’s genuinely amazing.
Driving over Chapman’s Peak in a coach provides quite a different perspective of the ruggedness where cliffs meet the water far below.
It’s always special being a tourist in your hometown, showing people what Cape Town has to offer. And as usual, over the last ten days, Cape Town turned it on.
There are now 130 tourists who have gone back to Brazil, wide-eyed and no doubt very keen to return for another visit.
